In May 2004 Jess Bravin broke the story of a Department of Justice memo (now infamously called the “torture memo”) that defined torture as having to include “excruciating and agonizing pain.” It suggested that the President had authority superseding U.S. anti-torture laws and that U.S. personnel had several legal defenses against criminal liability in torture cases. Jess Bravin now reports in the Wall Street Journal that there’s a new Justice Department torture memo. (The Washington Post and AP also have stories.) This one is authored by the Office of Legal Counsel and claims to clean up some of the language that raised alarm in the earlier memoranda from August 2002 and March 2003. You can read the report of the original memo here.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 31st, 2004 at 10:10 am by Mystery Man and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.